On May 25, 2005, at 6:19 AM, Dan LaBell wrote:

> I may have been  confused here, I was reading system disks patches  
> as equivalent to firmware updates.  People often complain about  
> having to have OS9 writable partition to use them, people who have  
> aquired machines to have install netbsd and have no macos.

You need an OS9 writable partition to flash update OpenFirmware yes,  
but only versions 3 and higher support flash upgrades. If you could  
flash versions prior to 3.x then the patches would probably be  
unnecessary. The patches are not the same as flashing the firmware.  
The first machines that supported OF 3 and flashable firmware were  
the iMac, Blue and White G3, and the Lombard. Anything with built in  
USB ports basically.

I'm not aware that there is anything fixed by firmware updates that  
would be required to run NetBSD, but it certainly would be in your  
best interests to have the latest firmware. Most of the fix lists for  
the firmware updates seem to surround things like firewire target  
disk mode, booting from the network, firewire or USB drives. I can't  
think of anything show stopping that would prevent NetBSD from  
running on an old version of the firmware.

Out of curiosity, is your machine really version 2.0.2 or is it  
2.0.1? I am pretty sure I have one of the late model Wallstreet II/ 
PDQ machines and it has 2.0.1